High Rising Terminals in Australian Eng- Lish: Form and Function
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The University of Melbourne Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Honours Thesis November 2008 High Rising Terminals in Australian Eng- lish: Form and Function by Kelly Webb 314813 Under the supervision of Associate Professor Janet Fletcher and Dr. Deborah Loakes Declaration This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of the University of Melbourne. Work presented herein is the original work of the author, unless otherwise acknowledged. Kelly Webb November 24th, 2008 2 Abstract This study examined various aspects of both the form and function of high rising terminals in Australian English. Using both narrative and collaborative speech data, relevant intonational phrases were labeled on severals levels and an objective method to classify question and declara- tive utterances was also developed. In particular it aimed to examine the relationship between speech act and location of the rise onset, as past studies have shown a significant result in New Zealand English. The findings were that HRTs have a ‘continuing’ function in dialog, that previ- ous findings of a phonological distinction between speech acts are unsupported, and that there appears to be no significant relationship between the location of the rise onset and speech act type. 3 Acknowledgements I would first and foremost like to express my gratitude to both Janet Fletcher and Debbie Loakes for all of their advice and encouragement over this past year, and for their confidence when my self-doubt was at its worst. Without their help this thesis would be a much lesser piece of work – in fact, almost certainly non-existent. I’d like to thank the department for this opportunity and for making my move from UWA as smooth and painless as possible. I’d also like to mention all my classmates and friends, new and old, who have given me some wonderful memories of Melbourne and whose sympathy and especially patience was much ap- preciated. Lastly, and most of all, I’d like to give special thanks to my parents, without whose generous support and belief in me I would never have been able to take even the first steps on this journey, let alone reach this point. I appreciate it more than is conceivable. 4 Table of Contents Index of Figures 6 Index of Tables 6 1. Introduction 7 2. Literature Review 9 2.1 Theoretical Background of Intonational Phonology 9 2.2 High Rising Terminals 10 2.2.1 Function 12 2.2.2 Form 15 2.2.3 Systemic Differences Amongst Varieties 17 2.3 Motivation and Aims of this Study 17 2.3.1 Aims 18 3. Methodology 19 3.1 Participants 19 3.2 Data Collection 19 3.3 Data 21 3.3.1 Labeling 21 3.3.2 Speech Act Classification 25 3.4 Data Analysis 27 4. Results 29 4.1 Rise Distribution 29 4.2 Rise Function 30 4.3 Rise Phonology: Distribution of H* and L* 32 4.4 Rise Alignment 33 5. Discussion 35 5.1 Distribution of High Rising Terminals 35 5.2 Rise Function in Dialog 36 5.2.1 Nuclear Accent and Dialog Act 36 5.3 Distribution of Nuclear Accent 37 5.4 Rise Alignment 38 5.5. Further Considerations 39 6. Conclusion 42 References 46 5 Index of Figures Figure 1. Examples of a speaker saying the word ‘Anna’, using both a falling and rising tune. 10 Figure 2. An example of the different levels of annotation performed on a IP with a HRT. ....... 21 Figure 3. Examples of the F0 levels and timing aspects of a HRT............................................... 23 Figure 4. Example of a HRT with the rise onset located in a post-nuclear syllable, labeled with the metrical strength of the syllables. ........................................................................................... 24 Figure 5. A metrical representation of the phrase in Figure 4. ..................................................... 24 Figure 6. Distribution of HRTs according to speaker, task and speech act.................................. 30 Figure 7. Distribution of nuclear accent type according to speech act. ........................................ 32 Figure 8. Location of rise onset in polysyllabic boundary tunes according to syllable................ 34 Index of Tables Table 1. The major SWBD/DAMSL codes used for dialog acts.................................................. 25 Table 2. Distribution of HRTs according to speech act and dialog act. ....................................... 31 Table 3. Distribution of nuclear accent types between speakers, according to speech act........... 33 6 1. Introduction The high rising terminal (HRT) has been a major focus of intonation research in Australian Eng- lish for over two decades. It has been of such interest due to its divergence from the commonly viewed ‘standard’ usage of HRTs in English, which is to signal a distinction between interroga- tive and declarative utterances. In addition to this usage, speakers of Australian English also use HRTs on utterances that retain their declarative modality. It is these declarative 1 HRTs, and the ways in which they may or may not systematically differ from question HRTs, that are the main subject of interest. The theoretical development that enabled some of the most recent research on HRTs is the ToBI intonation annotation system (Beckman & Ayers Elam 1997), which is based on the autosegmen- tal-metrical (AM) (Goldsmith 1976, Ladd 1996) intonation framework and Pierrehumbert’s (1980) intonational phonology for English. Because this transcription system allows for separate categories of pitch events, it allows an examination of the distribution of separate phonological features of the contour. It was these tonal categories that were used in a study of Australian Eng- lish HRTs that found that speakers systematically use the final accented syllable to distinguish between declarative and question HRTs (Fletcher & Harrington 2001). Further research into the function that HRTs perform in discourse showed that they are used in conjunction with dialog acts that serve to continue conversation, either by asking for a response from an interlocutor with a question HRT, or by indicating that the speaker intends to continue speaking. This similarity between both types of HRTs indicated that rising terminals are indica- tive of ‘open ended’ speech (Fletcher & Loakes 2006). Of particular interest in this study is previous research on HRTs in New Zealand English - a close neighbour that is very similar to Australian English. Various studies have found a relation- ship between the location of the rise onset and the type of speech act; on declarative HRTs the rise begins later than it does on question HRTs (Warren & Daly 2005; Warren 2005). A con- 1 In this study the terms declarative and statement are used in a specific manner so as to avoid ambiguity. Declara- tive will always refer to the modality of a sentence, and statement the syntactic structure. 7 trolled experiment examining the perception of HRTs and the location of rise onsets supports this view (Zwartz & Warren 2003). In this study, multiple factors will be analyzed in order to examine the behaviour and form of HRTs in Australian English. Both narrative and collaborative speech will be elicited from the participants, and the resulting data will be annotated on several different levels, including: speech act, dialog act, syllabic, phonological intonational features, and phonetic features relating to the Fo level and timing of the rise onset. The associations between these features will then be examined and the results discussed in comparison to previous research on both Australian and New Zealand English. It is hoped that this study will add to the literature on HRTs in Australian English, and help to further explain the role they play and forms in which they are realized which is a difficult area to study. 8 2. Literature Review This section will discuss the theoretical background of intonation research and previous research in regards to HRTs in Australian and New Zealand English. Both question and declarative HRTs will be described, and research into the function of both types will be presented, as will research into both the phonological and phonetic forms of HRTs. Finally, the motivations and aims of this study will be presented. 2.1 Theoretical Background of Intonational Phonology Arguably the most influential theoretical framework for tone and intonation is the autosegmen- tal-metrical model. First developed as autosegmental phonology by John Goldsmith (1976), and later termed autosegmental-metrical (AM) by Ladd (1996), the AM model represents phonetic features on separate, and parallel (as opposed to earlier linear models), hierarchical tiers. As a result, each individual feature (such as segments, syllables, stress and intonation), can be studied individually, as can the relationships between the levels. The AM framework, and contemporaneous work by Gosta Bruce (1977) in his analysis of the intonation of Stockholm Swedish, influenced Janet Pierrehumbert’s (1980) development of a phonological model to account for the intonational system of English. As opposed to earlier con- tour-based models (such as Halliday 1967), which considered the shape of the entire pitch con- tour of the intonational phrase (IP), Pierrehumbert’s account treated the contour as a sequence of pitch targets and boundary tones. These targets are categorized into three pitch events: pitch ac- cents are peaks or troughs in the contour that align with metrically prominent syllables; the boundary tone is the endpoint of the pitch contour; and the phrase accent, which is the section of contour between the final (known as the nuclear) pitch accent and the boundary tone. A labeling system was later developed based on this model, called the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) (Beckman & Ayers Elam 1997). In the ToBI system, the pitch targets are labeled as high (H) or low (L), and each different type of pitch event is associated with a different symbol; ‘*’ for pitch accents, ‘-’ for phrase accents, and ‘%’ for the boundary tone.